It's a mystery as to why the stats don't stack up

It’s information overload at the moment, certainly as far as stories from the world of brewing are concerned, but with a common thread running through the majority of these announcements (over-capacity, set against a declining beer market), I’m going to take a step back and ask the question, “What makes a story newsworthy?” I’d be a very rich man if I knew the answer to that, as it’s the sort of probing question asked by news agencies and media corporations across the globe.

The reason I’m pushing for an answer on this, is partially due to a lack of inspiration on my part – basically I’m short of ideas for things to write about, at the moment, but also because I’m genuinely curious as to why certain stories fall by the wayside, whilst others generate an amount of interest that can be totally disproportionate to the topic in question. In my case the majority of posts are beer, pub or travel related, with the occasional foray into other topical subjects, including at times politics or other world-related events.

One interesting feature about Blogger, which is Google’s free, blog-hosting service, are the analytical statistics concerning an individual’s site, which are available at the click of a mouse. For example, you can look back at the number of page views by post, for now, the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, last 30 days, last 3, 6 or 12 months, and even for all time. It is that last option which is so interesting, especially where one or sometimes two or three individual articles, stand head and shoulders above the rest. When you’ve written in excess of 1,700 individual posts it’s fascinating to see which of that number attracted sufficient page views to top the poll.

The screenshot at the beginning of the article shows the 10 highest scoring posts, of all time, and as you can see the list is quite a disparate collection of articles, with no real common thread running through them.  Several are quite controversial, such as Time to ditch the Good Beer Guide, Who Needs Social Media? and most divisive of all, A sparkler is a device which ruins beer. That last post certainly reignited the north-south divide, but despite appearing to deliberately court controversy there was a serious side to it.

To date it has attracted 5.9K page views, and 118 comments – although the majority of the latter ones seem to be from Russian bots. It also comes in at No. 2 on the list. Attracting one less comment (and no Russian bots), but ending at the bottom of the pile is – Who needs social media? There was a fair share of controversy running through those comments, but very little when it comes to the out and out winner, Half and half. Attracting 12.7K page views, but only 18 comments, I am still at a loss to explain how a relatively innocuous post, about mixing beers (light & bitter, brown & mild, old & bitter etc), could emerge as top of the pile, with more than twice the page views of the runner up.